“Maybe later,” the sarcastic one said.
“Definitely later,” the girl said. “How’d you get your scar?”
Which was very forward of her and a good walkaway kind of question, in that it violated every norm of default. Limpopo levered her torso out of the water and torqued to look at the mess of burn-scar from her ribcage down her thigh. She ran her fingers over it, the tightness and its irregular surface merely sensations now, no longer horrors.
“Happened not long after I first went walkaway. We’d built rammed-earth houses on the escarpment, two dozen of them. Real refu-luxury: power, water, fresh hydroponics and soft beds. Took about three hours a day each to keep the whole place running. Spent the rest of the time re-creating a Greek open-air school, teaching each other music and physics and realtime poetry. It was sweet. I helped build a pottery and we were building weird wheels that did smart adaptive eccentric spinning in response to your hands and mass, so that it was impossible to throw a non-viable pot.
“We were right up on the edge of default, close to the border. It was nice because we’d get day-trippers we could talk to about what was going on in the world. Tell the truth, I liked being on the border because it was an escape hatch. If things got bad, I could throw it in, walkback. Call my mom.
“The day-trippers weren’t always nice. There was a group of guys, neighborhood watch, who’d show up whenever anything went wrong in their fortress-condos. Someone got robbed: it must have been a walkaway. Graffiti? Gotta be walkaways. Murder? One of us, can’t possibly be one of those civilized types.
“For people living with continuous surveillance, they had a lot of crime. The property violations were their kids, who’d figured out how to turn off daddy’s spyware so they could get busy. If you think drones are going to stop teenagers from fucking, you’re out of your mind.
“I don’t know who did the murder. I heard it was horrible. Arson. Someone pwned a whole block of houses and did something with the safety sensors and the gas and whoof. Twenty-plus dead, including kids. Including a baby. I can’t imagine someone doing that, and I know it wasn’t anyone from our settlement. Something like that, it’s got to be personal.”
The three watched raptly, looks of horror dawning as they realized where the story was going. But Etcetera, bless his earlobes, spoke up, “Maybe totally sociopathic. A six-sigma event in someone’s neurotypicality. Not saying that a stranger doing that wouldn’t be totally fucked up and shit, but don’t discount the school-shooter/bad brains hypothesis outright.”
“I’ve wondered about that. I thought it might be provocateurs, because of what happened.” She traced the scar with her fingers. “Those rammed-earth houses, they’re really easy to instrument. The standard build has environmental sensors and fail-safes and alarms. They used the earthworks machines near the camp to mound up dirt on the façade and back lane of a whole row of houses, shifting tons of dirt and gravel in front of the doors. They walked down the line, calm as you like, smashing out windows and throwing Molotovs in each. Then they walked around the other side and tried the same for the back windows.
“But those windows were shatterproof, which is what saved us. They had a big argument about the best way to get through them. While that was happening, we were inside, organizing. The rammed-earth houses were two-up/two-downs, a family room and kitchen on the ground floor, an upper loft with two small bedrooms and a toilet. They were built to be thermostatic, cool in the summer, warm in the winter, circulation channels cut into each connecting wall, with nautilus-chambered noise-labyrinths that let air through but dampened sound.
“My house – I shared it with three other people – was at the end where they were arguing about smashing the windows. I knew that I had to get out, the place was full of smoke and fire. We were on the top floor, in the sleeping rooms, because it was the middle of the night. That meant that we weren’t in the flames, but the smoke was congregating on that floor. My friend kicked out the noise-labyrinth and we were able to squeeze through it into the next house, where there were five people, with the walls knocked out between their bedrooms to make one big sleep pit. They were in a panic because one of them had already passed out from the smoke. They wanted to try for the door. We calmed them, explained what was going on outside, sent them through the noise-guard into the next place.
“I had to get the word going, get people moving to that last place, so I hung back and messaged everyone, sipping at the pocket of fresh air until it got too rank, then I followed them. The next place was already cleared out and so was the next, and the fire in that place wasn’t so bad, so I paused to do some more messaging.
“I misjudged the smoke. Passed out. One of my friends figured I was missing and came back, pushed me through three more noise-guards until I was with the rest of the group. They split into two teams, one group downstairs to fight the fire and the other trying to bust through the end wall. The rammed earth was really good at deflecting blows, but you could claw and dig it away, and I thought there was enough crew working on that to get the job done.
“I went downstairs to fight the fire. The walls were impervious to flames, of course, but the Molotovs had their own fuel, and there was plenty of paper furniture and plastic kitchen appliances that burned if you got them hot enough. I had a wet cloth around my face, but it had dried, and I could hardly see or breathe. I didn’t even notice that my shirt was on fire until one of the other women in my crew tackled me and rolled me on the ground.
“By then they’d scraped a good-sized hole in the top floor, and thrown a pile of bedding and clothes onto the ground outside and we hang-dropped into it as fast and as quietly as we could.
“The vigilantes figured out what was going on, and came to ride us down. They had a lot of macho A.T.V. shit, plus drones. We had the clothes on our backs, and some of us were nearly naked. We scattered. I let the woman who’d put out my fire lead me into the brush, to a muddy culvert where we lay with just our mouths and noses out of the mud, so we wouldn’t have an IR signature. I had to get up first, all my body heat gone, the hypothermia setting in. I knew what it was, knew I’d be dead soon if I didn’t get warm.
“My friend tried to keep me from going, but I knew I was right. Whatever else was going on, I was going to die if I didn’t get warm. I stood. I shivered, and there was this pain here—” she traced the scar. “My friend cursed me back to the settlement, convinced we were going to get shot. But she came. Safety in numbers.
“Safety in numbers is a powerful idea. By the time we straggled to the smoking ruins, nearly everyone was there. The walkaways were in bad shape, hurting and coughing and cold. Staring at us from the other end of the houses were the vigilantes, hostile and unsure of themselves. They’d had a group madness that let them burn their neighbors’ homes. They’d been a mob, with diffused responsibility, the whole thing an emergent property of social mass, and now it had dissipated.
“My group set up an infirmary, right in front of them, treating our wounded with whatever we had. There were some people who’d hurt themselves jumping, some who’d gotten hurt in the scramble through the woods. It wasn’t until dawn broke and we did a head-count and a network sweep that we discovered four people were missing. Two of them straggled in later. Two were found in one of the houses, charred to bone, missed in that scramble. One of the dead was fifteen years old, and no one knew how to get in touch with his parents, somewhere out there in default.
“Word got out about the fire. There was a lot of U.A.V. traffic, not just copters and gliders, but bumbling zepps with medical relief and food. Soon there were people, more walkaways, and the straights freaked out and started to arm up, build a rampart to defend themselves from reprisals.